It may not be sexy, but judging from HP’s most recent financial results, it sure helps the bottom line.įinally, IBM launched a new services offering in the cloud computing arena. As he says, “It’s not sexy stuff, but it makes a big difference.” Also, HP announced their Green Business Technology initiative, which aims to help businesses cut costs and triple datacenter capacity with new energy-efficient technologies and services. In a new InfoWorld article, Bill Kosik, managing principal of the new HP division, talks about the nuts and bolts of datacenter efficiency and the impact of targeting power distribution systems. HP bought EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a consulting firm, last year after they jointly worked on a project to consolidate 85 datacenters around the globe into just six. HP’s Critical Facilities Services division is focused on building energy-efficient datacenters or retrofitting existing ones. The collaboration will enable Wikimedia to host ever-increasing volumes of rich media and video content and also support the collaborative development and testing of new Wikipedia content and applications by its global network of users. The announcement describes how Sun will help Wikimedia build a secure and scalable open source web infrastructure using Sun Fire x4500 and x4150 servers and Sun StorageTek storage arrays. I also thought it was pretty cool and just in the nick of time that Sun Microsystems announced a major coup with the Wikimedia Foundation. Just like other Amazon Web Service (AWS) offerings, CloudFront is self-service with no up-front commitments, no long-term contracts, and works on a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme. With it you can distribute content using a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds. I thought I’d highlight some of the more interesting news items from the last week and then give a short summary about what these announcements portend for the year ahead.Īmazon announced the public beta of Amazon CloudFront, a new web service for content delivery.